Jim Linderman blog about surface, wear, form and authenticity in self-taught art, outsider art, antique american folk art, antiques and photography. Dull tool and dim bulb were the only swear words my father ever used. Items from the Jim Linderman collection of vernacular photography, folk art, ephemera and curiosities. (Note: if anyone believes an image contained violates their rights or insults their intelligence, simply point it out and I will remove)

Mining the margins of pop cultureEvery morning Jim Linderman gets up in his home in Grand Haven, Michigan, grabs a cup of coffee, and sits down at his computer to blog. A former librarian and archivist, Linderman collects, researches, and writes about the marginal, the forgotten, and the not quite seemly in American folk art and popular culture. In his three blogs—Dull Tool Dim Bulb,Old Time Religion, and Vintage Sleaze—Linderman also discloses an underground history of American popular culture, one oddball tale at a time....New York Times, Feb. 9

Carnival Cutout Standee. Three lovely woman on a "girls day" at the carnival! (Does this suit make me look hippy?)

Who doesn't have a photo in the basement or the attic of the kids in fake stockades at some western tourist trap? They are back, if they ever left, that is. Here is a company which will make them, disco-style.

I'm a little busy today, so no story, though I am sure there is a good one. Just a few real photo postcards of a "faith healer" at work. NOTE: This post is also on the blog old-time-religion, where miracles such as this occur on a regular basis.

The best "no trespassing" signs are the ones you have to trespass to read. You can click to enlarge this one, but it won't help any. Usually, the worse the sign looks, the most you want to follow the directions. I once had a shotgun pulled on me near a no trespassing sign. I had stopped not to read it, but to steal what I thought was portions of a LONG abandoned whirligig nearby. I was wrong, but learned having a gun drawn on you isn't really so bad. I was worried more about buckshot in the rental car than I was for my life.

I saw those nice boys on American Pickers buy a factory made porcelain no trespassing sign this week. Two comments. Boys? That weren't no good no trespassing sign, and you don't even KNOW "Free Styling"

I never did find out what sideshow game Roly-Poly was, but if they really did award a prize to every player you can be sure it was from under the counter, not from the wall display in back.

I will, however, take the slightest excuse to share Bob Wills, especially when it is a number performed by the great Tommy Duncan. Tommy was smooth as the expensive whiskey Bob was able to drink to excess every day, but what made the pair work so well was the suppressed, seething tension in Tommy's voice every time the lovable drunk buffoon stepped on his lines with a patented "Aaah Haah" aside. You can tell Tommy wanted to throttle Bob, the biggest country ham in the state of Texas, but it was a good gig.

He finally left...and as the clip below shows, he should have stayed. Still, you have to see a real roly poly play the Bob Wills part. Gnaw on a biscuit.

Some serious folk art wood carving by Anonymous, who was so good he even had his own special "wood carving coveralls" for when the chips began to fly! Too bad there is no identification on the photo reverse, but at least we know the work depicted was finished around 1921. Close-ups here show not only the remarkable carving, but his weapon of choice.

Chicago citizens will sleep better knowing the pin-up peep shows have been unplugged by Chief Investigator Paul Newey. Since there was no other crime in the second city on this day in 1959, Chief Paul invited the press over to see his collection of confiscated coin-op smut. Paul's pursuit of the peep shows was crime-bustin' action of the highest order. To celebrate (and convince the public Newey was on top of the situation) he flicks his ashes on the filthy coin slot in distain!Original Press Photograph (8" x 13") Unknown Chicago Paper 1959 Collection Jim Linderman

A circa 1880 hand-painted tintype. It is remarkable to consider the photographic process which resulted in an actual unique physical object one could hold, paint by hand and frame has gone from black and white to gone in two or three lifetimes. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but the warmth of an image may have gone with the film.

As far as the public goes, each step forward in the photographic process helped the producer become more effective (and profit more) while leaving the consumer holding less of a product in his hand. While it is an art, and it is progress... it is easy to view photography from a simple supply/demand capitalistic perspective. Dags, so beautiful and shimmering, an amazing thing folks will still circle to see at a show, turned to cruddy metal tintypes which were churned out like pizza at the shore in one lifetime.

It wasn't long before paper came and paper went. Instant photos followed and dropped the quality even further. Now the darkroom is empty and the bits and bytes which tore the guts out of reproduced music have done the same to pictures.

More and more recording artists are releasing their product once again on vinyl. As I understand it, digital music provides only a very small percentage of the aural quality not only possible, but once common. Once even standard. The consumer loses but pays more for it than ever before.

What is yet to be fully understood is what we have lost in pictures. Is the photo above particularly beautiful or desirable? Nope, not at all. But you could hold it in your hands.

Years ago, I had the fortunate pleasure of visiting one of the most prominent collectors of American folk art on a regular basis. Besides teaching me much, I was learning at the feet of a master. (Literally...there was no room in his house and I had to sit on the floor.) We traded things back and forth monthly. I would study them, he would study them, and once in a while swaps were made. The stuff didn't have much financial value then, and I'm not sure if it does today.

I once brought the collector three huge carnival knock-down targets, each about 3 feet tall, with effigies of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo painted on them. I didn't want Hitler in my house, so I hoped to trade them for an equally not valuable whittled miniature cane he had by a carver from Georgia. (Years later I saw Saddam Hussein painted on some carnival punks at the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, so things never change.)

I cabbed them down and presented them saying "check out THESE punks!"

What surprised me was that he immediately asked me why I called them "punks" and I really didn't have an answer. I'd just always known carnival knock-downs as punks. The collector was puzzled, which surprised me, as he had earlier curated museum shows having to do with esoteric material culture from the sideshow and such, and he certainly owned some. I figured no one could puzzle the master.

He told me "punk" was a term used to refer to a younger homosexual man dating an older man. I had no idea. To me at the time, punks were the Ramones. Or as Joe Franklin, perennial host of a local TV show called them "The Ray Mones" while appearing as puzzled by them as my collector friend was at my punks.

I knew gay "punks" were called "twinks" which I believe may still be in common usage. I'm a little isolated here, so I don't know for sure, and we should refer to all without derogatory terms anyway. But that also makes sense, as my collector friend was Eastern big-city based, and I suspect knock-down targets received their punk name in the Midwest.

If you look up punk in a carny lingo dictionary, the slang term has numerous uses. As a rube, a child. a trick, a fake fetus in a bottle, a person primed for a scam, an "easy target" as it were...though the punks here were intended to be a hard target. That's why they had fur...to create the illusion of width, and the carny would also encourage the punk in FRONT of him to lean in "for a good toss" because you would then be throwing off balance. He would watch as ball after ball whiffed through the fur not moving the targets at all.

I found these androgynous punks in an antique mall. My "axis of evil" punks are long gone and I can't find a picture, but I cribbed one of a similar group from an auction website below. Mine were better, as they were entirely made by hand, but these will give you an idea. As a bonus, see Marky and Joey "Ray Mone" jabber it up with Joe!

These 100 year-old postcards depict Sumo when it was a bit more muscle and a bit less mass, but in a sport where the goal is not to be moved, either certainly works.

In Japan, the skill is still admired with reverence and tradition we can not even imagine. We love our sports players too, but certainly none of ours go back to 1684, the year Samurai seem to have completed their many centuries long metamorphosis to Sumo. Our biggest and earliest sports heroes only go back to the similarly built (but hardly fit) Babe Ruth, and there are still some of us alive to have actually SEEN the Bambino. (Not to disparage the Swat Sultan...at least he only cheated on his diet and his wife, and his only performance enhancing drug was hot dogs and beer.)

One other big difference between ancient tradition in the East and the mere 100 year old sports in the West? While winning a tournament certainly has financial reward, just look up the average salary of a Sumo wrestler.

Rubbing a New York State bounty in the rest of the world's face, a well-stacked and stocked "Vegetable Tower" reins over the State Fair of 1918. It was harvest time, and you know all those zucchini ripen at the same time. The upstate farmers must have run out of friends to pass them off to. Click to enlarge and you'll see corn, pumpkins and who knows what else. I do not believe the vertical cornucopia caught on...I find no mention of one at the WORLD'S fair twenty years later down in the city.

Looks like the breeze has started to "clutter" the Lucky Strike "message" a bit.

Skywriting has never been measured for advertising effectiveness that I know of. Certainly "brand recall" would apply here. That is the measure of effectiveness advertising agencies fall back on after the campaign is over and sales have not climbed one tiny bit.

"Hey Charlie? Did you remember what them skywritin' pilots put up there in the sky" "Ayup, sure do Gordy, T'was the Lucky Strikes"

Brand Recall!

What we do not know if either Charlie or Gordy went to BUY a pack.

Similar era photographs of a "ground team" working on market share for a competitor are HERE.

"Perpetually ahead of the collecting curve...a one man Taschen. An authentically curious individual...diligently archiving the forgotten curiosities of American History"

Emma Higgins in Art Hack May 2012

"Jim Linderman likes Art, Antiques and Photography and his collection of Vernacular Photography, Folk Art, Ephemera and Curiosities is a wonderful place..."LifeElsewhere with Norman B. 2014

"...collected over the years by Jim Linderman, a character who seems the perfect subject for a Harvey Pekar comic. Linderman treats collecting like a calling, and his finds have a resulting air of authority, stunning in their capture of bygone picturesque moments."Derek Taylor Dusted

"The pictures, discarded artifacts of ecstatic Americana, come from the stash of Jim Linderman, who in his introduction recalls advice he’s plainly taken to heart: “Collect the heck” out of whatever you find interesting."Drew Jubera Paste Magazine

"His interest in art is rivaled only by his interest in music, and one expression informs the other. He pursues objects with thoroughness and an innate sense of curiosity..."Tanya Heinrich Folk Art Magazine

"Linderman acknowledges the obscure at the same time that he elevates it.... His collections tell vast stories in sotto voce, allowing curios and objects shadowed by mainstream culture and ideology to converse and be heard. What we hear is an enormous American sub-culture speaking in forbidden, marginalized languages: stuff discovered boxed in the attic out of embarrassment or zealotry, smutty ash trays crowing next to religious pamphlets, each claiming a part of the complex, sometimes contradictory, always conflicted American imagination, a chaos of memories that will one day vanish."Joe Bonomo Author of Conversations With Greil Marcus, Jerry Lewis Lost and Found and No Such Thing As Was

"Documenting--one clipping at a time--the scrapbook of a leg and garter aficionado that was dumpster-dived in Virginia in the 60s" "...an outstanding image-archaeologist who has compiled a shelf-ful of worthy and unique photographic histories."William Smith Hang Fire Books

"Linderman has a knack for discovering untold stories and introducing them to a wider audience"Joey Lin Anonymous Works

"Jim Linderman...makes us all look a little puny"Could it be Madness-this?

"...there's something beyond the endless photos and postcards and weird propaganda from another time that he lovingly documents - I think it's the collection as a whole, the portrait of a person fascinated with culture and communication. I have met people like this before, and in reading Dull Tool Dim Bulb I feel I have been lucky enough to meet one more. This site is a goldmine in terms of links..."The Hyggelic Life October 2009

"Linderman is always on the lookout for the new and exciting"Chuck and Jan Rosenak Contemporary American Folk Art

"...an amazing collection..."Revel in New York October 2009

"Jim Linderman has a nice little colllection of interesting books and blogs...But every so often he just loses it."American Digest March 2010

"FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, COLLECTOR JIM LINDERMAN has searched high and low for authentic things--unique and special objects that define the artistic culture of the American experience. From folk art to popular culture, from pulp fiction to Delta Blues-- Jim is a walking authority on so many things American they are too numerous to mention. One thing is certain-- his collecting interests are for things that have fallen through the cracks, those things lost and forgotten--the box of material under the table at the flea market booth. If it wasn't for dedicated collectors like Jim Linderman-- so many important objects about our culture would have surely been lost to time and indifference."

"Jim Linderman maintains a most interesting blog about the most amazing things from his collection—a site he calls “Dull Tool Dim Bulb,” the only curse words his father ever uttered. I love it, and read it everyday.""...an excellent writer and I devour your blog daily. I am impressed at your deep knowledge of things within your niche..."John Foster Accidental Mysteries

"I am grateful to Jim Linderman for first alerting me to the existence of the 1930s Spiritualist hymn "Jesus is My Air-o-plane."William Fagaly New Orleans Museum of Art, Author Tools of her Ministry: The art of Sister Gertrude Morgan

"Linderman describes a long gone world...(he) claims not to be a writer but he is most certainly an excellent researcher..."BOOKSTEVE

"Jim Linderman, King of the Internet Ephemeral Arts"Spaniel Rage

"Jim is a fantastic historian...show him some love"Astrid Daley Fringe Pop / Sin-A-Rama

"Almost an experimental narrative"Idiopath

"He came to us with hundreds of jaw-dropping baptism photos that he'd been collecting for 25 years," Ledbetter explains. "By the time he found us, he'd already done half a lifetime's works, and he trusted us to handle it properly." Lance Ledbetter in Creative Loafing 10/13/11

4. It is not in any way replaceable with an uncopyrighted or freely copyrighted image pertinent to the work referenced in the article

The copyright for some images are most likely owned by either the publisher, the writer(s) and/or artist(s) which produced them originally.

Any other uses of this image may be copyright infringement.

Although most of the images here are original photography and objects owned by the author and in the author's personal collection, we cannot absolutely guarantee the exact copyright status of the items or offer written assurance that every or any aspect of this work is completely cleared for all usages. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

Any Trademarks used in this item listing are used for strictly descriptive purposes only. No association or endorsement is implied or inferred. No character or trademark ownership is given or implied.

If you are the owner of any aspect of an item which you believe to be copyrighted, please contact us immediately at j.winkel4@gmail.com